oblio wrote:
It's not the AS, it's the not knowing.
In that sense, aware it really is the understanding, [finding out about my]
AS is the absolute best thing that ever happened to me and ever will.
I have never cared that much about apparently not being very social
(that, and being very 'handy' socially if need be, resulted in me not truly
experiencing 'impaired social interaction' (which includes communication
in my book). That's what rendered me invisible as a possible autist.
It's not really that autism is an invisible handicap,
it is the fact that autism can be invisible to the sufferer -
that's what creates the suffering, at least at my level of HFA.
Not knowing and facing the unavoidable social consequences of your own
(acknowledged) social inaptitude without ever understanding why -
that is the suffrage, that's what almost evicted me onto the streets.
Still&always, I do recognize, and deeply so, that I have been very lucky in having been spared all those things that to many are no doubt an affliction; in my case, I do recognize many of those afflictions in myself as traits - which I had already learned somehow to use to my advantage - it is amazing how 'autistically' and auti-friendly I had already arranged my existence before I was ever diagnosed.
So, no I do not suffer AS. I have AS, and I have issues.
This sounds sort of like me. Sometimes I wonder if I would fit better under the HFA diagnosis than the AS diagnosis because I seem to have a lot of autistic traits, but I am also well adapted socially (though I wasn't always).
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Into the dark...
25 Nov 2008, 9:22 pm
